Optimal Stabilization Policy Under Governmental Risk Aversion

Governmental stabilization policies take account of the underlying risk aversion of its voters. A utility function for the government is defined, one which includes variances of national income changes with respect to its policy instruments—here the budget variable, the bond rate of interest, and the currency-exchange rate. The consequence of this for the optimal set of policies is a target level of national income less than what a risk-neutral government aims at. This applies to an open economy when this is a key-currency country, as it need attend to balance-of-payments effects only insofar as they affect national income. The non-key-currency country, by contrast, must take account directly of balance-of-payments effects and their variance, so it reaches a lower level of utility than the key-currency country.     

Strategic trade policy for Eastern Europe

The integration of the former state-trading countries into international free trade may, on the one hand, sensibly complement the reforms now under way towards their becoming market economies; on the other hand, this move harbours the risk of perpetuating and indeed aggravating the economic backwardness of those countries. The detrimental effects can be avoided if a product-cycle-oriented economic policy is pursued which makes a deliberate point of utilizing the relatively rich endowment of human capital available in these countries.     

Costs and benefits of EU enlargement

While the political benefits of the coming EU enlargement are relatively easy to identify, its economic and financial consequences are less unequivocal. The following article examines the likely costs and benefits of enlargement to both existing and future Members, and in particular how it will affect Germany, one of the few present EU Member States which has direct borders with acceding states. The article expresses the personal opinions of the author.     

Stock Markets,Banks and Long Run Economic Growth: A Panel Cointegration-Based Analysis

The aim of this paper is to investigate the long run relationship between the development of banks and stock markets and economic growth. We make use of a Johansen-based panel cointegration methodology allowing for cross-country dependence to test the number of cointegrating vectors among these three variables for 5 developing countries. In addition, we test the direction of potential causality between financial and economic development. Our results conclude to the existence of a single cointegrating vector between financial development and growth and of causality going from financial development to economic growth. We find little evidence of reverse causation as well as bi-directional causality. We interpret this as evidence supporting the significance of financial development for economic development although banks and stock markets may have different effects depending on the level of economic development.     

How many Deutschmarks are held abroad?

The German currency is held and used abroad because of its liquidity and stability relative to most of the world’s currencies. DM banknotes are used as a transactions medium and as a store of value. The number of these which are held abroad is of interest to policy-makers for various reasons, but is rather difficult to estimate. Professor Seitz outlines the results of several estimation methods and discusses the monetary policy consequences.     

Towards a Measure of Core Inflation using Singular Spectrum Analysis

This paper constructs a number of possible core measures of inflation using singular spectrum analysis (SSA). Annual changes in monthly inflation are decomposed into its trend, oscillatory and noise components in order to develop an understanding of the trend and cyclicality in South African headline inflation. Three cyclical components with differing amplitude and frequency are identified. The trend and cyclical components of inflation are found to be a good approximation of core inflation, the inertial part of inflation. These core measures are compared with other candidate core measures based on the properties of a good core inflation measure. Generally, the SSA measures outperform commonly used measures of core inflation based on both in‐ and out‐of‐sample performance.